The Labyrinth Makers (2 page)

When Mrs Harlin slipped in unobtrusively with his tea ten minutes later he was already prepared for her.

'There's some more material I'd like, Mrs Harlin. To start with,
The Times
and the
Mirror
for last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Then from Records–here, I've made a list.'

Mrs Harlin was poker-faced. 'I'm truly sorry, Dr Audley, but Sir Frederick requested that you concentrate on that one file for the moment. He said that everything else would be available in due course.'

Candidates would not be permitted to consult text-books. And Fred had foreseen that he would start cutting the corners straight away. Which was in itself informative, though aggravating.

By 6.45 he had completed the initial reconnaissance of the material. He closed the file and turned to the five photographs he had spread over his desk.

Five faces … five men. Four had baled out and lived. One had stayed aboard and had taken twenty-four years to die.

He lined up the survivors. Tierney the second pilot and Morrison the radio operator, the men with such good memories; Maclean the navigator and Jones the passenger, who had mildly contradicted each other. If they were all still alive it would be interesting to discover how much Tierney and Morrison had decided to forget, and how much Maclean and Jones had managed to remember.

He stared at them for a time, then turned them face downwards and drew the fifth face towards him.

John Adair Steerforth.

Photographs could lie just as persuasively as people, but this was surely Lucifer's face: handsome, proud and dissatisfied. Perhaps there was a trace of weakness about the chin, but the mouth was firm and the slightly aquiline nose aristocratic. Women would have loved him very easily–hard luck on them that he was dry bones. Or maybe good luck?

At least the funeral was explicable now. But his own role and his involvement was still inexplicable. On the face of it there was not the slightest link with the Middle East here.

On the face of it. He opened the file again. A document like this was no simple collection of facts. It had a story of its own to tell. The newness here was deceptive: the material and language was dated. But it had been cut since, possibly twice, and edited–once clumsily, and then more skilfully. Audley recognized the pattern. He gathered up the scattered papers and his notebook. Now was the time for some of the answers.

Fred welcomed him with a graceful apology.

'Butler and Roskill I believe you know, Dr Audley. And this is Mr Stocker, who represents the JIG.'

Butler and Roskill were both European Section men as far as Audley remembered. He had once briefed Roskill on the Dassault company's dealings with the Israeli air force, and the young man had impressed him. Butler looked exceedingly tough, with his short haircut and bullet head.

But Stocker was the one to watch, particularly as Audley had never quite understood the exact role, or at least the ultimate power, of the JIG.

Fred gathered them with a glance.

'You've all read the Steerforth File now. What do you make of it?'

Butler would be first.

'A collection of non-information,' said Butler in a voice that was Sandhurst superimposed on Lancashire. 'A lot of clumsy people looking for something, and we never came close to finding out what it was.'

'I don't think they were all that clumsy,' said Roskill mildly. 'I think they were in a hurry.'

'Well,
we
were clumsy. The interrogations weren't handled firmly–there was no co-ordination. We should have leaned harder on the ground crew. And on the Belgian.'

Audley wondered what a firm Butler interrogation would be like.

'The RAF Court of Inquiry was just whitewash. The trawler captain's evidence proved nothing.' Butler was getting into his stride now. 'And the survivors' evidence was conflicting.'

'Baling out isn't a clear event,' protested Roskill. 'I once baled out of a Provost. I don't believe I gave a very clear account of it, though.'

Butler shook his head.

'The conflict was between the two who were vague and the two who rehearsed from the same script. It was all too pat–first the radio, then the engine. It smells–to me it smells.'

Good for Butler, thought Audley. He was worrying the right bits of evidence, sniffing instinctively at the weaknesses. A firm Butler interrogation might be a lot more subtle than the man's personality suggested.

'On this evidence,' concluded Butler, 'there's no proof that the Dakota ever came down at all. It could have been a put-up job from start to finish.'

Good for Butler again.

'But it did crash,' said Roskill. 'We've got it.'

'Roskill has the advantage of you there, Butler,' said Fred. 'You've been out of England–and you're not such an avid newspaper reader as Dr Audley. The Dakota came down in an artificial lake in Lincolnshire, not in the sea at all. And last week that lake was accidentally drained–it was an accident, wasn't it, Roskill?'

Roskill nodded. 'Carelessness, anyway.'

'And Steerforth?' Butler asked.

'Steerforth was still in the cockpit,' replied Fred shortly. 'Now, gentlemen, as you will have read, our interest in this began by pure chance, when it was learnt that the Russians were interested in the missing aircraft. First there was the known agent, Stein. Then there was the military attache. And there was also the Belgian, Bloch, who claimed he had nothing to do with the others.

'We couldn't touch the attache, of course, and as Butler has pointed out, we didn't get anything out of anyone. We came to a dead end. Officially Steerforth was a dead hero, who chose to crash at sea rather than hazard life on land. Unofficially he was a smuggler who'd picked up something so hot he didn't dare crash with it. You will note the references by the crew to the unauthorised boxes in the cargo space. Steerforth's property, apparently.'

'But at least the other side didn't get anything either, so the matter was more or less shelved. Until the Dutch got in touch with us in 1956, that is.'

He pushed three slim files across the table.

'Ever since the war they've been busily reclaiming more bits of the Zuyder Zee, and in every bit they find wartime aircraft wrecks–German, British, American. They're very good about them. Very correct and dignified, with no sightseers or souvenir hunters allowed.

'But one day they came to ask what was so special about Dakota wrecks. Every time they came across a Dakota they'd had all sorts of Russians sniffing around. Just Dakotas. British Dakotas. It didn't take much checking to decide which Dakota interested them.'

Butler cleared his throat.

'But we've got Steerforth's Dakota now.'

'Indeed we have. We've got the Dakota, and Steerforth, and the mysterious boxes. But there was nothing in the Dakota, and nothing in the boxes either.'

'Not exactly nothing.' Roskill unwound himself. He was a nonchalantly clumsy man who gave the impression that he hadn't finished growing, and that upright chairs tortured him.

'Builder's rubble, that's what the boxes contained. Or perhaps I should say bomber's rubble, because the experts are more or less agreed it's Berlin stuff, vintage '45. Otherwise the Dakota was clean.' He grimaced. 'If you don't count a ton of mud.'

'Had the boxes been tampered with?' asked Butler.

'The wood was pretty rotten, of course. But no–the lids were untouched. I'd say they were as consigned.'

'Identification positive?'

'Steerforth or the plane?'

'Both.'

'Oh, yes. No trouble there. Numbers for the plane, perfectly readable. Identity tags and teeth for Steerforth –and an old arm break. Absolutely no doubt.'

'Cause of death?'

'We can't be precise there. Drowning while unconscious is my guess. There was no evidence of physical damage.'

Butler looked round the table.

'And nobody spotted it for twenty-four years?'

Roskill shrugged. 'It was out of the search area. Overhanging trees, thick weed. God only knows how he put it down there. And the weather was poor for a week or more afterwards, the worst sort of search weather. It's not so surprising–it's well off the beaten track.'

Roskill added three more slim, identical files to those on the table.

'It's all in there. Plus my estimation of the probable course of the aircraft–he must have made a much wider turn than was assumed after the crew and the passenger baled out. That's what put the search off the scent, apart from the low cloud they had to contend with. He would have crossed the coast again a good ten miles south of the direct route–if he hadn't put down in the lake. Which was a damn good piece of flying, as I've said.'

'Why did the plane crash?'

'It's in my report,' said Roskill, with the smallest suggestion of asperity.

Butler persisted. 'How well does it tally with what the crew said?'

Roskill shook his head. 'It's going to be very hard to say. It was the port engine they complained about, and it took a clout from a treetop coming in. That and twenty years under water–it doesn't make the detective work easy.'

He looked round the table. 'To be honest, we may never know. There can be a million reasons. If it's plain human error, like fuel mismanagement, we'll certainly never know now. They'd been losing height–we know that from the survivors; I've known cases where a pilot had an engine malfunction and simply shut down the wrong engine. Not even a DC-3 would stay up then, and at that height it would have been fatal. Or maybe he simply misread his altimeter. I tell you, there are a million ways it might have happened.'

'All right, then,' said Fred, heading off any further technical argument. 'How does this fresh information change your interpretation of the original conclusions, Dr Audley?'

Audley looked up from his notebook to meet Fred's mildly questioning gaze, which in turn caused the other three men to look at him. He had been reflecting just a moment before, with satisfaction, that so far he had not said a word since arriving.

But then he really had nothing yet to say–nothing, at least, which he could say in front of strangers. He certainly couldn't say 'What am I doing here, for God's sake?' at this stage in the proceedings.

'Dr Audley?'

It would be an interesting academic exercise to discuss the nature of an unknown object which was able to retain its value over so many years. No secret terror weapon, no list of traitors now in their graves or their dotage could last so long. Newer and far more terrible weapons had made the technology of the 1940s antediluvian. And a whole generation of younger and differently-motivated traitors had superseded the honest simpletons and rogues of Steerforth's day.

And no single Dakota could carry enough mere loot to hold the Russians' interest down the years. Or in the first place, when they were bulging with German valuables.

'I assume,' he said tentatively, carrying on his thoughts aloud, 'that the Russians
are
still interested. That's why we are here now, at this hour, without our breakfasts?'

Fred smiled.

'They are indeed, Dr Audley. In fact I'm afraid they were down at the crash site pouring beer down navvies and interviewing talkative aircraftsmen before we were. But I meant have you anything to add to the Steerforth File in the light of his reappearance?'

Audley started to adjust his spectacles, and then stopped awkwardly. He had been trying to control that gesture for years, without real success.

'I mean, are the Russians still interested, after having learnt that those boxes contained rubble? Did they learn that? It's an important distinction.'

'Assuming that they did–what then?'

'I should have to know rather more about Steerforth. There is a possible sequence of events, but I wouldn't like to advance it yet.'

'Why not?' This was Stocker at last. 'You have a reputation for drawing remarkably accurate deductions out of minimal information. I'd very much like to hear what you make of this.'

Audley felt a flush of annoyance spreading under his cheeks. It galled him that he had a reputation for understanding without reason. Intuition had its place, and was valuable. But only in the last leap from the ninth known fact to the inaccessible tenth, and never at the very beginning. And even at the last it was not to be trusted.

He knew he ought to control his feelings, and hold the only real card he possessed. But he couldn't.

'I'll tell you one thing I do know'–he tapped the Steerforth File with his index finger–'that Major Butler was more right than he knew when he said that this was non-information. I'd like to see the original file, for a start.'

'The original?'

Audley sighed. Maybe he did have that flair. It would be easier to admit an inspired hunch than to explain that he could look between the lines of this material to see the gaps in the narrative, the sudden thinness of the material, the changes of style, the tiny inconsistencies of editing. All of which suggested the removal of something too intriguing to be left to the common gaze.

He looked to Fred for support.

'Quite right too,' said Fred. 'You shall see it. Stocker only wanted to know—'

'—I only wanted to see Audley pull a rabbit out of his hat.' Stocker smiled, and was transformed by his smile from a faceless JIC man into a human being. Audley felt that he had been small-minded and pompous.

'And you did pull a rabbit out. Only it was not the one I expected. I'm sorry to have played fast and loose with you. Sir Frederick warned me. But the missing bits don't concern Steerforth, I assure you. You'll still have to find out about him for yourself. Which I believe Sir Frederick is arranging for you.

'On which note I will bid you good morning. It has been a pleasure to see you at work, even if only briefly. But I shall be seeing you again soon.'

Audley could only blush, and shake the hand thrust out to him. Then Stocker was gone, and the atmosphere lightened perceptibly. Audley observed that both Butler and Roskill were grinning.

'I really cannot understand,' said Fred, 'why the JIG always produces threat reactions in you people–even in you, David.'